Pull Me Out

1. 123

The story of civil aviation is told in sequences of
numbers—flights, models of aircraft, hydraulic fluid designations.
Famous accidents become known by their flight numbers—Eastern 401,
Air India 182, Wayfarer 515.
Like the full names of serial killers or executed persons, this is
the official mnemonic way to record this data. Categories of planes
are distinguishable by number(s): the Airbus A-320, the Boeing
747-300, now the Boeing 747-8. If you wanted to
superstitiously/erroneously avoid planes with recent crash records,
you would already know what the Boeing 737-200’s been up to this
century–more like down to. Because the elevators and ailerons of a
modern aircraft are too heavy to operate on pulleys, every plane is
injected with hydraulic fluid. Introduced in 2010, the hydraulic
fluid endorsed and used by Airbus and Boeing is Skydrol PE-5; it
features the longest fluid life of any commercially available
fluid. We fly on fluid.

A staple of pop culture and the subconscious equally, the
nightmare of the plane crash didn’t really go away once we woke up
to the reality of air safety. If not perfectible, the form has at
least been retired from any speculative realm that might imply we
still don’t know what we’re doing. Planes don’t crash as often as
they used to, and the adage of a commute by car being more
dangerous than a cross-country flight remains obnoxiously true.
2012 was deemed the safest flying year on record,
with 475 fatalities. Only one of those accidents was in the
United States—a FedEx-operated Cessna, with one fatality.

Contrast that with the full year of 2005, in which there were
1,103 deaths, a figure which was down in turn from 1,593 in 1995.
Contrast those with the apocalyptic year of 1985, during which
2,629 lives were lost worldwide in some of the industry’s most
devastating accidents, and you can now get on a plane in your most
comfortable tracksuit and pretty much know you won’t get any blood
on it. Alow and aloft, commercial aircraft now operate with the
surety and smoothness of clocks unbroken; they are seldom wrong
even once a day.

If you were to workshop a feared and fictive plane crash, it
would look a lot like that year’s crash of Japan Air 123. Still the
deadliest single-aircraft accident in history, it was a rare mix of
mechanical error, overcrowding, and hypoxia. By the mid-eighties
air travel had become so indispensable to Japanese life that Japan
Air was using 747s for the slightest of island hops, which is like
getting your Rolls-Royce out for a trip to the corner store. Four
minutes after takeoff from Tokyo on August 12 1985, Flight 123’s
tail blew off. Complete hydraulic failure and scary
pitching-and-rolling ensued.

On the cockpit voice recorder transcripts, the pilots showed
symptoms of oxygen deprivation. But they kept the plane flying for
32 minutes before it hit Mount Osutaka. Four passengers of the 524
people aboard survived; the numbers of dead were further skewed by
the remoteness of the region and a lot of jurisdictional bickering
by the Japanese bureaucracy. Families of the victims, unable to
properly visit the site, toured it by helicopter like unstoic heads
of state.

Flight 123 is representative of plane-crash mythology because of
that half-hour ordeal during which the passengers surrendered any
illusions, as the plane headed off-course, away from Osaka. A
crashing plane is often just a burning building in the sky. Many
aboard Flight 123 wrote notes to their loved ones which resulted in
a found mosaic of self-exorcism. Was there a moment, on this plane
or another, when the shared charge of death impending became
euphoric? Only the survivors know and that’s redacted, sensibly,
from most accounts. Even admitting to thinking about it feels a bit
like rattling a beggar’s cup amongst a bunch of bones. Morbid or
mendacious, my obsession with air accidents is all about the
following item, which may or may not be fresh off the intellectual
black market: At least in a plane crash, you don’t have to die
alone.

2. 587

In 2001, there was an outbreak of plane crashes. The
commandeered 9/11 flights were acts of engineered monstrosity; the
perpetrators essentially took courses in how to crash a plane. The
air-fatality numbers for that year look impossibly juked; 3,256,
including lives lost on the ground, in the towers and inside the
Pentagon. The data includes the 227 aboard American Flight 587,
which went down over Rockaway, Queens on November 12. Flying into
wake turbulence immediately upon takeoff, the first officer
followed his training and worked the rudder pedals, which promptly
broke the aircraft. The composite materials that make up the body
of an Airbus A300-600 cannot sustain the kind of undue stress to
the vertical stabilizer that was induced by the first officer’s
tactic. American Airlines changed its training program accordingly
and in 2009 retired the A300-600 from its fleet entirely. That day
everyone still thought it was a terrorist attack.

Similar to a Dickian precog dreaming exclusively of murder, one
of the few recurring dreams I have that’s fit to print is of a jet
falling to earth right in front of me. Sometimes I’m driving and
the plane falls into windshield-frame from right to left; sometimes
I step outside where I live and the plane flips gymnastically into
view with the sky as balance beam. People die in them all the
time–the planes and the dreams. I feel a migratory pull toward the
scene that isn’t altruistic. It’s voyeuristic, maybe even
heuristic. I’m not much of a joiner but I want to run screaming
into the damage.

An accident similar to Flight 587 in that it involved casualties
external to the flight and a neighborhood being lacerated is the
Cerritos mid-air collision of August 31, 1986. An Aeroméxico DC-9
struck a Piper Archer, killing everyone aboard both planes and 15
on the ground. The carnage at the scene was so gruesome, a
first-responder recalled in the accident’s episode of “Air Crash
Investigations,” that he went into a kind of color-shock and
saw things only in a graduated form of sepia. Sometimes the brain
is only okay with seeing certain traumas when it has filter
approval, and maybe that’s why we have plane-crash dreams.

On dream message boards, before misspelled hilarity breaks out,
there is general agreement that dreaming of plane crashes means you
have either a) set personal goals that are unrealistic or b) are
losing control of your private and/or professional life.

3. 447

The numbers of doomed flights, like the addresses of notorious
murder houses, are customarily changed. Asiana 214, last summer’s
flight from Incheon, South Korea to San Francisco that ended up
downed and then cursed by Orientalist memes, is now somewhat
bizarrely known as OZ212. American 587 is now American 1749. Air
France 445, between Rio and Paris, was Air France 447 before it
flew into an intertropical convergence zone over the Atlantic on
June 1, 2009 and didn’t fly out. Air France 445 may be viewed as
the first postmodern plane crash. It took two years, endless
premature narrative journalism accounts, and millions of allocated
Euros to fully address a ludicrous question: what brings one of the
most cutting-edge aircraft in the world, the Airbus A-330, straight
down from 35,000 feet as if pulled by a giant hook? Besides obvious
answers like ‘a bomb’ or the even more smug ‘nothing,’ the answer
was found to be: man himself! You can make an airplane failsafe and
utterly able to fly itself, but you can never remove the human
factor. Not really, and not entirely.

Flight 447’s computers recorded a number of in-flight errata
after the plane’s airspeed, calculated by little outboard things
called pitot tubes, failed to register. Ice crystals had
incapacitated the pitot tubes, a contingency on which both Airbus
and Air France were not uneducated. In its
trenchant 2010 look at the accident, Der Spiegel
reported nine similar occurrences on Airbuses between May and
October of 2008 alone; moreover, Air France had issued a memo to
all its pilots concerning pitot-tube failure. Like most memos, it
looks really helpful in hindsight. Once the A-330’s
airspeed-indicator kicked out, the autopilot switched itself off
and one of the three living, breathing pilots corrected the pitch
of the plane. The jet’s speed dropped 90 knots in less than a
minute, inducing a stall; the plane began to fall at a rate of
12,000 feet per minute. Your aircraft cannot break a stall when you
destroy lift by reducing airflow across the wings; pitching the
plane’s nose up does that. Flight 447 hit the Atlantic at 65 times
the force of gravity.

Forensics and less intricate science—such as that all the
lifejackets were still in their protective packaging and the oxygen
masks were never deployed—found that Flight 447 was the inverse of
Flight 123: most of the passengers didn’t know they were about to
die. The A-330 literally fell out of the sky and landed, for lack
of a better word, intact and belly-first. During the four minutes
that took, everyone was strapped into their seats but presumably
not braced for impact. In the middle of the night, assume a high
percentage were asleep. On board was the wife of the pilot,
Pierre-Cédric Bonin, who was at the controls when the autopilot
disengaged; assume she had no idea her husband was about to end her
life.

This accident is not significant because of what it says about
technology and mortal mistakes. It’s significant because it feels
like the last of an era. There will be other plane crashes. But in
its awful pathology, catastrophic mood and oneiric outtakes, Flight
447 was certainly the end of something—a century of hubris maybe,
the wildest kinds of if-man-were-meant-to-fly trollery finally
sustained. Flight 447 was the last air accident to surprise anyone,
despite its initial engaging mystery. It’s a perfect coincidence
that investigators, while hunting for the black boxes, used the
same autonomous underwater vehicles that were used to find the
Titanic.

Rueing the sanitation of air travel and the removal of all
reasonable doubt can sound glib. The fetishization of accidents is
a pretty natural outgrowth of that lament. I don’t wish crashes on
planes. I am theoretically open to the possibility of a crash being
the danger, however small, that makes flying fun. If you fly
nervously but find statistics to be comforting in times of stress,
deciding actuarially that you’re probably not going to die in a
plane crash and flying anyway is no less morbid than perusing
plane-crash data at Stalinian remove. Statistics are still what
happens to other people.

Anthony Strain lives and works in Los Angeles. He thinks he may
be the love of your life, or at least a love of a life. His Tumblr
is Circumswoop; his
Twitter is @euphorianth.